A Hundred Suns

by Karin Tanabe

  “Yes,” I said quietly. “Now I have.”

  I looked down at my hands, Red’s eyes following mine.

  “You haven’t had your ring fixed yet,” he said, touching my right hand with his. I pulled it away sharply. I knew that touch.

  “The ring is irreparable,” I said quietly.

  The next group of horses was being walked toward the line, and I watched as the jockeys fought to rein in their energy until the critical moment.

  “I should be off,” I said, looking at Red. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  “You’re not a bother,” he said, with a grin. I looked at his face, the curve of his lips. They were so familiar to me. He had to be lying.

  “So long, Michelin,” he said as I gathered my bag and stood up. “Don’t worry, you’ll soon get the hang of this place. Maybe opium just isn’t the drug for you.”

  I ran out of the building, ready to fling open the car door, but Lanh saw me coming and opened it first.

  I crawled in and started to weep into my palms.

  “Are you all right? Is there anything I can do to help?” Lanh asked, turning around to look at me.

  I shook my head no, my face getting wet.

  “Shall I take you to a doctor, madame?”

  “Please, no,” I said, shaking my head again and pawing at my waistband, trying to find the bag with the shards of my ring in it. “I just want to go home.”

  I thought of my experiences these past few months in Indochine. The nerve-racking day at the café. Marcelle repeating that awful word. Kissing Red. Smoking tobacco, which I’d managed to avoid even while growing up on a tobacco farm, and then opium, even going to a den on my own. Seeing the caked blood on the back of the dead communist’s head. Staring at the men shackled together at Dau Tieng, breathing in the nauseating scent of death. I thought I’d be able to handle anything, to be the helpmate Victor needed in this utterly foreign place. But I was failing. That was obvious to me now. I just couldn’t allow it to become obvious to him. He’d think I wasn’t being supportive, that I didn’t care enough about his career. Maybe he’d think my nerves had gotten the better of me and bring me back to Europe. I imagined a stint in the institution in Switzerland, then back to Paris, where Dorothy would surely tell him my secrets with glee. Victor would never be allowed to manage any aspect of Clermont-Ferrand. And he’d try his best to divorce his crazy wife and keep Lucie away from me.

  Overwhelmed again, I cried until I had no tears left. When I looked up, I realized that Lanh was driving us around in circles instead of taking me home. After I’d finally quieted myself, I told him I was ready to go.

  It wasn’t until our house was in view, our sunny home, that I spoke again. “Lanh,” I asked, “do you remember those posters you were describing to me when I was on my way to Haiphong? The ones advertising train travel and the one hundred stations?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, brightening.

  “I know you saw them when you were a child, but have you seen any since? Around town or in the rail stations. Anywhere?”

  “No, I haven’t,” he said after a short pause. “I don’t think I’ve seen one in fifteen years.”

  I nodded again. Those men were wrong. Lanh had to be wrong, too. “Lanh,” I said. “Please keep this episode between us. I don’t want Monsieur Lesage to know. About anything.”

  “Of course, madame,” he said, catching my eye in the rearview mirror. “Nothing that happens to you, in this car or out of it, is ever mentioned to Monsieur Lesage.”

  When we pulled up to the house, Lanh helped me out of the back seat. I leaned against him as we made our way up the slate walkway. I needed to disappear for a few days. I needed my mind to go blank. But first, I needed my child.

  “I would like to see Lucie,” I whispered as we reached the door. “She’ll make me feel better,” I said, imagining the warmth of her hand in mine.

  “Of course,” he said as Trieu opened the door for us.

  I tried to straighten when we walked in the foyer, to not make a spectacle in front of Trieu, but Lanh didn’t let me.

  “Allow me to help you upstairs,” he said. “Then you can relax.”

  “Lucie,” I whispered, looking in Trieu’s direction.

  “Madame Lesage would like her daughter brought to her room,” said Lanh loudly as he helped me up the stairs.

  “Miss Lucie is not home,” said Trieu, looking at me with concern. “She walked to the lake with a friend after school to sail their toy boats. Cam is with her.”

  I looked at Trieu and then Lanh again and started to sob. Everything that I counted on to make me feel better was disappearing.

  “Please,” said Lanh, holding my arm tighter. “Bring Madame Lesage a glass of water. And hot tea. Very hot. And something to eat. Quickly,” he added as he helped me upstairs.

  When we got to the bedroom, he let my arm go and I shuffled inside my closet. I took off my clothes and then came out in my robe and slipped between the covers. I could feel Lanh’s presence. He was outside the door, waiting for me to tell him I was fine, but I felt as if I might never be able to say those words again.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Marcelle

  November 15, 1933

  “It’s very strange for me to hear that,” Paul Adrien said, looking at me from across the small café table that I’d brought him to near the main gate of the Temple of Literature, the city’s prettiest Confucian temple.

  “I imagine it is,” I said after I’d finished explaining to him that I had brought him to Hanoi under false pretenses.

  “Because your letter was very … explicit.”

  “Yes, it was. But I had to make sure you came. And I thought perhaps something explicit might do the trick.”

  “It did,” he said, leaning closer to me. “But that is not what you have in mind?”

  “It is not,” I replied sharply. “I’m afraid I deceived you.”

  “Well, even clothed, you’re very pretty to look at,” he said, moving his tall frame back in the metal chair. “Am I right in thinking that you and I only met that one time, yes? In Haiphong at the café. There was whiskey.”

  “That’s right,” I repeated. “And yes, there was much whiskey.”

  “But then you had a letter delivered to me. You said you wanted to see me. You paid for my journey here.”

  “I did.”

  “Because you have thought about me, nearly every day, for the last four years,” he said, quoting the letter.

  “That’s right,” I replied. Now that I had cleared up my false promises of a sexual relationship, I was enjoying his bewilderment.

  “But you haven’t known me for four years?” he asked.

  “I have, in a sense,” I said, looking at him. I had thought about this moment so many times, but now the words felt heavy on my tongue. “I’ve thought of you because you are the man who shot my friend Cao Sinh in the back. You are the man that killed him.” I noticed Paul Adrien stop moving, his spine bent, his hands suddenly still. He knew who Sinh was. “What kind of man shoots an innocent person from behind? I wondered. Does a police officer in Indochine, especially one who works for the secret police, have a different type of mind than the rest of us? Is he just capable of more cruelty? And what kind of man can live with himself after doing that? What kind of man is Paul Adrien? That’s what I’ve been thinking of for the last four years.”

  “I see,” Paul said, closing his eyes for a moment. “If that’s the case,” he noted quietly, “then you have thought about me every day since the thirtieth of April 1929.”

  “That’s right. As has he,” I said, looking to my left. I stood up and gestured to Khoi to approach us. He had been sitting across the park, waiting for my indication.

  I’d needed to be alone when Paul came since he was only expecting me. We could not do anything that would make him change his mind, to refuse to join me.

  “Who is that?” Paul said, suddenly alert, as he watched Khoi walk over to us.<
br />
  “That is Nguyen Khoi,” I said.

  “Sinh’s family?” Paul asked.

  “Yes,” I replied without hesitation. “His brother.”

  When Khoi was next to us, Paul put out his hand in greeting, but Khoi just bowed his head and sat down. It was the first time I had ever seen Khoi let emotion reign over politesse.

  “You’ll talk, I’ll listen,” said Khoi. “And then if I think you merit it, I’ll talk, and you’ll listen, so you can get to know the man you killed.”

  “Yes … if that’s what—”

  “I need to know, in every detail, what happened on the last day of Sinh’s life,” Khoi said. “Perhaps that will help to stop the bleeding of our hearts.”

  “Or perhaps it will make it worse,” I added. But to my surprise, I realized this was what I wanted, too. I needed to know as much as Khoi did.

  “This may not make any sense, or any difference,” Paul said after we were all quiet for a moment, “but I have thought of your brother Sinh every day since he died. Since I killed him. If there was one thing that I could change in my life, it would be that day. It would be that decision to pull the trigger.”

  Khoi looked my way and locked eyes with me for a moment, a small acknowledgment between us, that this man, as Khoi had guessed, was merely the executioner, not the one who decided the death sentence. That had been the Michelins.

  “But why, then? Why would you do such a thing? Did he attack someone like we were told? It’s just not possible,” I said. “The investigation indicated that he had, that you shot him because of his aggression, but Sinh, he did not have aggression in him.”

  Paul nodded his head, but I couldn’t tell if he was doing it out of respect or agreement. “After Monsieur Sinh was arrested,” Paul said, moving his hands nervously on the table, “which happened as soon as he came off the boat, after his trunks and suitcases were inspected, he was detained in a holding cell alone for several hours, with me watching guard. Nothing went wrong then. He was very quiet. He sat on the ground, he tried to sleep. He was tired, frustrated perhaps, but not angry. But when he was released—and I only know this because I escorted him from the holding cell to an office—he was informed by my superior that the French government had banned him from ever returning to France because he was now accused of spreading communist thought. And, they noted, his French ‘friend’ was never allowed to come to the colony. That friend was a woman, I imagined.”

  “Banned from ever seeing each other,” I said quietly. “We were told that, too.”

  “It is not uncommon for political prisoners to be banned from returning to France,” said Paul. “I saw it happen many times, for less than what your brother had done.”

  “But no one really cared about his political leanings,” Khoi said quietly. “Not enough to grant that fate. What they cared about was that the man in question, Cao Sinh, was sleeping with a daughter of the Michelin family. Un homme Asiatique, a rich French girl, and a family reputation coupled with extreme racism—those were his crimes.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Paul, his jaw tightening. “I didn’t know that she was part of the Michelin family. The girl they banned from Indochine.”

  “And now you do,” I said angrily. “Did you think it was just a lovely twist of fate that you were given this comfortable post by the Michelins? What they’re doing is rewarding you for killing someone.”

  “I did think it was fate, yes,” said Paul. “But I see that I was wrong.”

  “Where else did you go wrong?” asked Khoi, his voice rising. “Where else did you slip? Was killing Sinh an order or an accident?”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” said Paul. “It was an order. But it was the wrong order. My superior, a man named Desroches, he was the one who told Cao Sinh that he could never go back to France. And that the girl could never come to the colony. After he spat those words, your brother lunged at him. He did, I suppose, attack him. But he was unarmed. And he was a smaller man. We could easily have pulled him off of Desroches, I see that now. But at the time, Desroches panicked. He ordered me to shoot. He screamed. He … he insisted. So I did. I shot. I had no intention of killing your brother. I don’t think I even wanted to shoot him. It just all happened so quickly. But it came down to a young man, an ignorant young man, me, following an order. I regret it terribly. As I said, I have thought of your brother every day. His death—or perhaps it would be less selfish to say my action, yes, my action—caused me to lose myself completely. I had trouble keeping a job in France. I was arrested for public drunkenness. For disorderly conduct. My wife left me.”

  “But then Michelin saved you,” I said, feeling no sympathy for Paul Adrien, but perhaps less hatred.

  “A colleague of mine, one who had been in the room the day your brother died, he knew what kind of shape I was in,” said Paul, his hands moving again, nervously. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I suppose it’s clear now that he appealed to the Michelins and helped me here.”

  “How simple it all is. How simple they can make it,” I spat out. “What you’re earning here is blood money. It’s because you saved the family from further embarrassment. You killed the yellow pest.”

  Paul paused and looked at Khoi, bowing his head apologetically. “I’m very sorry for what I did. I don’t want any sort of payment for it from Michelin, that I’m certain of, so mine will be a short stay in the colony,” he replied. “Very short.”

  I stood up, to let Khoi finish his conversation. I no longer wanted this man in front of me.

  “You may be repentant now,” I said, “but you are guilty of being woefully ignorant. For that, I’m very glad to hear you’ve suffered.”

  “I’d like to speak to his father, your father,” he said to Khoi as I walked away, still believing Khoi was Sinh’s brother. “I’d like to apologize.”

  “You would only be doing that to try to mend your own heart,” I heard Khoi reply, “while ours remain broken. Do not look for anyone. Go back to France. This is not your country. It’s mine.”

  * * *

  I let Khoi’s words fade away as I walked to my little red car and opened the door, feeling like I was entering a new phase of life. We knew how Sinh had died. A combination of his love for Anne-Marie, the weakness of men like Paul Adrien, and the hatred the Michelins carried for the very people they were colonizing had killed him.

  I turned the handle of my car and climbed in, gasping as I realized there was someone already sitting inside. It was Red.

  “Jumpy, Marcelle. So jumpy.”

  “What are you doing here, Red?” I asked, sitting down and leaning back against my closed car door as he grinned at me. He placed a finger against my lips to silence me.

  “Today, I do the talking,” he said. “Because you paid me so handsomely at Le Chat d’Or, and because your pretty face provided a little boost to the intense pleasure I was already receiving, I’m going to give you something for free.”

  “I do not need anything you’re peddling,” I said, turning back nervously to see if Khoi was heading to me. He wasn’t.

  “You’ll want this,” said Red. He leaned in close to my face and whispered, “I saw Jessie Lesage yesterday. We went to a horse race together, at her request.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. See, sometimes you like what I peddle,” he said, reaching out and touching my leg. I let his hand stay for a moment and then pushed it off my thigh. “At the race, she told me that she had gone down to Cochinchina, to their plantations. Then she asked if I knew about the dead communists. And if I did, why I didn’t do anything to save them.”

  “Who are the dead communists?” I asked, taken aback.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Did she say she tried to save them, whoever they are?”

  “I don’t know,” said Red. “She was at a horse race wearing emerald earrings. I don’t think she was busy being Florence Nightingale in Cochinchina.”

  “Right. It sounds like the only person sh
e saved was herself, then.”

  He leaned back and reached for the car handle. “Usually people in this colony think it’s me who needs saving. Not this time, though,” he said, grinning. “Helpful?” he asked.

  “Very.”

  “Good,” he replied. “Then a kiss for old time’s sake.” He let go of the handle and leaned into me but pulled away right before our lips touched. “Don’t worry, Marcelle,” he whispered. “I’ll never tell Khoi about Paris. Luckily for you, I like him too much. Him, and that boat.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Marcelle

  November 16, 1933

  “Bird’s nest soup?” I asked, picking up the beautiful handwritten menu from the dining room table, which was extended and set for twenty-six. “Impressive.” I held up the thick sheet of rice paper, admiring the elegant image of a mulberry tree above the details of each course.

  “Nothing but the best for our guests,” said Khoi. “Now, how about you return to the living room before people think we’ve abandoned them?”

  “They’d be thrilled if we did,” I murmured. “Those who’ve never been to your house are itching to go upstairs. They all want to see how the Nguyens really live.”

  “Never,” he said, bringing his lips to my neck. “I have to keep some secrets.”

  “I hope you at least locked up that photograph. If Victor wandered up to your room for some reason.”

  “I did,” he said, kissing me quickly. “And you’re still sure about the rest?”

  “I’m still sure,” I confirmed.

  After I’d talked to Red, I’d run out of the car and spoken to Paul Adrien again. I’d asked him if he knew what Red was referring to. Who were the dead communists on the Michelin plantation?

  He’d told me about a list he’d given to Jessie in Haiphong, which in turn had been given to him by the chief Michelin recruiter in Tonkin at the request of Victor Lesage. It was a list of ten names. Men who were suspected of trying to incite a communist uprising.